Subscribe and win – last chance! Hurry – this is your last chance to win this original oil painting, Finding CIRCA by Geraldine O’Neil, valued at over €5,000. Details on the bookmark enclosed in this issue, online at www. recrica.com/subscribe, or e-mail [email protected]. Two-year subscribers will go into the draw three times, plus receive a free copy of Space: Architecture for Art valued at €25.00. CIRCAcontemporary visual culture in Ireland issue 112 CIRCA ART MAGAZINE EDITOR Peter FitzGerald INTERNATIONAL EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Elizabeth Aders BOARD Orla Ryan, James Kerr, Ken Langan, Peter Monaghan (Chair), Darragh Hogan, Isabel Nolan, Mark Garry, Graham Gosling, Tara Byrne CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Alannah Hopkin (Cork), Luke Gibbons (Dublin), Brian Kennedy (Belfast), Shirley MacWilliam (England) EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD (this issue) Orla Ryan, Darragh Hogan, Isabel Nolan, Peter FitzGerald CIRCA is concerned with visual culture. We welcome comment, proposals and written contributions. Please contact the editor for more details, or consult our website (www.recirca.com). All enquiries CIRCA, 43 / 44 Temple Bar, Dublin 2; Tel / fax (+353 1) 679 7388; [email protected] Assistants: Elaine Cronin, Claire Flannery, Rosa Tomrop- Hofmann, Simona Pompili, Min Jung Kim Printed by W & G Baird Ltd, Belfast Opinions expressed in this magazine are those of the authors, not necessarily those of the Board. CIRCA is an equal-opportunities employer. Copyright © CIRCA 2005 ISSN 0263-9475 For our subscription rates please see bookmark, or visit www.recirca.com, where you can subscribe online. CIRCA 112summer 2005 EDITORIAL 19 UPDATE 20 FEATURE ARTICLES Dorothy Cross and the Art of Dispossession 24 Mining a Quarry: Stabat Mater by Dorothy Cross 34 The Multitude: Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland at the 2005 Venice Biennale 38 Disciplining te Avant Garde the United States versus the Critical Art Ensemble 50 Portraiture and Social Context – A Case Study 60 REVIEWS Carlow: The Institute of Potential, Art and Failure 67 Derry: Jacqueline Saloum at Void Gallery 70 Letterkenny: Caroline McCarthy: WindowWall 72 Limerick: ev+a 74 Clonmel: Ann Mulrooney and Ciara Healy at STAC 78 Herzliya: The Belfast Way at Herzliya Museum of Art 80 Dublin: Isabel Nolan at Project 82 Dublin: Madeleine Moore at Pallas Heights 84 Dublin: Mark Manders at Irish Museum of Modern Art 86 Belfast: Cahal McLaughlin at Catalyst 88 London: Mairéad McClean at University of Greenwich 90 Limerick: Mark O’Kelly (and Sarah Pierce) at Limerick City Gallery of Art 92 Limerick: Mark O’Kelly at Limerick City Gallery of Art 94 Dublin: Royal Art Lodge at Douglas Hyde Gallery 96 Art Spiegelman: In the Shadow of No Towers 98 Belfast:Visonic at Ormeau Baths Gallery 100 Cork:Visual Practices across the University at Lewis Glucksman Gallery 102 Front cover: Mark O’Kelly: New Amsterdam, oil on linen, 2004; see reviews, pp. 92 – 95 EDITORIAL It’s a sign that you’re on to something big when your ing how society has so many apparent prescriptions and computers turn against you. So it was with this issue: as proscriptions surrounding who may be portrayed and the deadline for going to print approached, first one, then displayed. another, then a third of our trusty Macs abandoned contact with their hard disks. They took internet access with them. Then there’s the biggest article, Declan Long’s piece on the It’s a mystery how the inanimate is so intuitive –-the way coming Venice Biennale. Few who were at the opening of computers know to delete dissertations as the due date the last Biennale will ever forget it. Never mind the surreal looms, or even humble hangers gather into snarly piles. beauty of the city, the lapping of water instead of the noise of cars, the pleasure of being in Italy once again. In forty- Perversely, then, we’re emboldened by our hardware hang- degree heat, the opening days seemed to be as much about ups. The changes we’re planning must be worth the effort. survival as about art. This time round, Venice might as well With this issue, the emphasis is on new types of content. be about Ireland, so large is the delegation of artists heading We’re carrying fewer reviews, but they’re longer: we felt in its direction. For the first time, Northern Ireland will a growing need to let our writers go into greater depth. have its own pavilion, and Commissioner Hugh Mulholland Something similar has happened with the feature articles. has put together a fascinating list of artists and events. For Again, we felt a more expansive, more profound approach the Republic of Ireland, a relatively old hand at Venice by would yield dividends. now, Commissioner Sarah Glennie has chosen slightly fewer artists, but the emphasis seems again to be on reflecting the Theming has also gone. It’s something that CIRCA has used strength and diversity of artistic practice. in the past; it seems to play itself out after a while, having served its purpose. We are now publishing a mix of feature Behind the scenes, and at the risk of giving our computers articles, ‘magazine style’. And that means we’re open to apoplexy, much more is afoot at CIRCA. We now have an submitted texts, or ideas for texts - please approach us. Editorial Advisory Panel. The Panel discusses and helps in the decision about what art events to review and what It’s a pleasure to print here two articles on Dorothy Cross. feature articles to commission. (Panel members are excluded Ask any art student here to name one artist from Ireland, from promoting coverage of events with which they are and Cross’ name is likely to be first on most tongues. Her personally involved.) And we are firmly hoping that the commitment to artistic endeavour, the resonance of her September issue of CIRCA will reflect another major change: work with its audience both here and internationally, and we are outsourcing a redesign of the look of the magazine, the sheer quality of her output easily justify the inclusion of and dying to see the result. In that regard, an online poll on these texts. We have timed them to coincide with a major recirca.com has been very useful in guiding our decisions retrospective on Cross at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. – many thanks to the very many who responded. We are also carrying a long text by Gregory Sholette on another very committed artist, Steve Kurtz, and the Kurtz / One or two last thoughts: don’t miss our forthcoming book, CAE affair. For ‘affair’ perhaps read ‘tragedy’:an artist who Space:Architecture for Art, to be published in June; it’s should have been allowed to mourn his wife found himself edited by Gemma Tipton and promises to be a stunner. For a instead the centre of paranoid bioterrorism charges. The limited period, if you take out a two-year subscription to the affair is unfolding in upstate New York, but it seems to tell us magazine you will receive this book absolutely free. At the a great deal about the world in which we are now living; it’s same time you can enter into our subscription prize-draw, not reassuring. and possibly win an original, CIRCA-commissioned painting by Geraldine O’Neill. Art and politics also mixed when Michael O’Dea’s portrait of the murderer of Veronica Guerin was shown at the Royal If you are reading this, it is because the computers have Hibernian Academy in 2003. Maggie Deignan’s text here allowed it; perhaps they are appeased for now. Enjoy the takes us through media reaction at the time, attempting to magazine. understand what it was that caused so much outrage. Read it, and you may see portraiture in a new light; it’s surpris- Peter FitzGerald CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 • 19 UPDATE Louise Bourgeois gift The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, announced on 17 May a surprising addition to its collection. As a result of IMMA’s Louise Bourgeois: Stitches in Time exhibi- tion in 2003 / 2004, Bourgeois has gifted Untitled, 2001, shown here. According to the press release, it “…is one of the artist’s character- istic front-facing fabric heads, which is displayed in a glass vitrine. The head is one of a suite of seven, each unique, made from a soft pink material, originally one of Bourgeois’ jackets. The work, including the vitrine, measures just over 177 cms in height.” IMMA hopes to have the Bourgeois work on display by the end of the year. Louise Bourgeois: Untitled, 2001; courtesy Irish Museum of Modern Art Beuys query the 1970s and ’80s. He is looking to make contact with anybody who has a personal memory of Joseph Beuys, the towering figure of postwar German Beuys from this period. He can be contacted at art, was also a frequent visitor to Ireland, where he was [email protected] or by phone at +353 apparently in the habit of turning up unexpectedly at 87-2825960 or c/o 10 Caragh Road, Dublin 7. various art colleges. CIRCA has received the following : So if you have any personal recollections to do with the Documentary filmmaker Donnacha Ó Briain master of fat and felt, you know what to do. is currently researching a film on Joseph Beuys’ involvement in Ireland and the Celtic regions in 20 • CIRCA 112 • Summer 2005 UPDATE ‘Culture Ireland’, to which artists can apply if they have a show or other event abroad. Oddly, even though the camera viewpoint Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon comes under the same department as Culture Ireland, the two bodies seem to have different rules in relation to Northern Ireland: Culture Ireland apparently takes applications from artists sky resident in Northern Ireland, while the Arts Council takes applications from artists from the Republic who are sea resident anywhere in the whole world except Northern Ireland.